Free The Weird Company by Pete Rawlik Page A

agreed upon the division of certain responsibilities and duties. They both handled the arrangement with a perfunctory sense of duty, and though they quickly grew to accept each other’s company, there was no love between them.
    Indeed, even after she gave birth, the relationship was purely one of routine. Zulieka’s care of, and for, the girl that her father named Asenath (Me!) was minimal at best, and the bulk of meeting my needs was left almost entirely to my father. My father describes me lovingly, but also as so very small and so strange, almost alien. He had seen so much in his years, so many wondrous and terrifying things, and he could do things that normal men could not, and yet when he held me in his arms, none of that mattered. I became his life; everything else, including his studies, seemed unimportant. Instead of spending time with the dead, and returning them to a semblance of life, he was drawn to me and the true life, the normal life that I represented. And thus, he abandoned his studies and his secret laboratory and spent his days and nights caring for me, while Zulieka roamed the house aimlessly. Or so he thought.
    He had been warned. Obed had said something, told Ephraim not to trust them, any of them. The first time he found Zulieka in the basement, she was in the library; she had just shelved some books, which ones exactly he couldn’t say, but he should have realized then that she was searching for something, something she didn’t want him to know about. It went like that for some time. Zulieka would wait until he was distracted and then secretly access his private laboratory and library. This disturbed him, but besides locking the door and securing a few volumes, there was little he could do, his entire focus was on his daughter Asenath, me. That is until the letter came and offered to explain things.
    He went to Arkham and spoke to a man called Peaslee who claimed to be Mr. Steve Mentzel’s colleague. Peaslee had the same emotionless face that Mentzel had had, and though what Peaslee had said would have driven some mad, Ephraim believed it with absolute certainty. Something was going to intrude into our world, to be brought here by people who didn’t truly understand it. Once it arrived, the world, the very universe, would change irrevocably, and life as we know it would cease. There was a moment, at least according to Peaslee, that everything could be changed, when intervention was possible. Ephraim had to prepare, said Peaslee, for this and other threats that were waiting, as well as for the possibility of failure, and of discovery. When Ephraim told him that he understood, that he knew what needed to be done, that doing all this would be easy, he lied. Ephraim returned to Innsmouth cloaked in fear, unable to comprehend what was going to happen or how to prepare for it.
    Yet upon his homecoming his concerns about the future were smothered in tragedy. While he had been in Arkham something terrible had happened. Zulieka had suffered some sort of seizure and had collapsed in her bed. The doctor had been called and had rapidly concluded that whatever had happened was beyond his skills. Zulieka could neither stand nor talk, she could crawl, and utter a few words, but whatever had happened to her had turned her into little more than an infant. Yet for all her diminished faculties she was possessed of immense strength, and in time it was clear that her condition wasn’t going to improve. Desperate, Ephraim renovated the attic, padded the walls and installed chains. In the spring of 1909 he took Zulieka up the stairs and though he could see that somehow this creature loved him, he left her in that room, and never let her out again.
    Not that this mattered much. Zulieka had ignored me, and as a result I had apparently failed to develop any real affection for the woman. Her separation from the family seemed to have no negative results; in fact the opposite was true. It was as if some great switch had been